Stegway

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (16-bit)

»

Enemies

»

Stegway

Stegway
Game: Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (16-bit)
Affiliation: Eggman Empire
Hits to defeat: 1
Points: 100

Stegway (initially known as Stego) is a formerly scrapped Badnik created for the Mega Drive game Sonic the Hedgehog 2. The "Stego" name comes from source code found in the Nick Arcade prototype of the game.

Overview

Despite being named after the stegosaurus, Stegway has the appearance of a red triceratops with two forearms, a silver jaw and horns, a pair of wheels underneath its body for locomotion, and an exhaust pipe for propulsion. Stegway's attack pattern is relatively simple, simply trundling back and forth using its forearms until Sonic is in its sights. Once the enemy spies the blue hedgehog, it thrusts its arms forward and charges forward at him similar to the Snail Badnik. Any attack can easily defeat it.

The Badnik was originally intended to appear in Hidden Palace Zone, and was one of the first enemies shown in the earliest promotional material for the game. However, in the "Nick Arcade" prototype the Badnik has not been placed in the stage, but can be placed using edit mode albeit with broken graphics, while its intended graphics are unused in the ROM. The Badnik was briefly removed from Hidden Palace's edit mode object listing in the "Simon Wai" prototype, the hex address for the sprite being at offset $7AD18. In the August 21st "alpha", Stegway was re-added to the edit mode object listing with an updated sprite to use Sonic's colour palette, however uses the wrong palette line when placed. As Hidden Palace was gradually removed in later builds, Stegway continued to remain in the code until "Beta 4" (where its updated artwork was first found at offset $84BE4), and was removed in "Beta 5" onwards.

While both Stegway and the level it was designed for were cut from the original release of the game in 1992, the Hidden Palace Zone was restored in the 2013 remake of Sonic 2, with the triceratops Badnik (along with Redz and BBat) being featured enemies once more. Stegway's attack pattern is the same as in prototypes, except it briefly pauses once it sees the player's character, and a revving sound is heard right before the triceratops rockets ahead. The Badnik uses its original sprite from the earlier prototypes rather than the updated artwork found in the August 21st "alpha" onwards.

Graphics for the enemy were created by Tom Payne.

Concept art

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

  Working out Stego in sprite form.

• 

  Digitizer sheet under the name "Dinosaur".

• 

  Digitizer sheet

• 

  The original mockup screenshot.